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Mismanaging disasters - Nature's forces - floods, cyclones, fires and this week the earthquake in Christchurch - won't stop, yet we still live on flood plains, in the bush, on the beach and in earthquake zones.

Transcript

Now, finally to Ian Townsend and our disastrous future.

Ian Townsend: Around the country, and around the world, more natural disasters are killing more people, and damaging more property.

American disaster expert, Thomas Drabek.

Thomas Drabek: Well the data on that are really quite clear. We are having more disasters. Now we're having more disasters because over the past couple of hundred years we have been very successful in building a large number of structures that are at risk. So when you combine the population mobility, along with population increases, along with the remarkable luxury of wealth that the industrialised countries have experienced. So you put all that together and then you begin seeing the natural processes of earthquakes and volcanoes and hurricanes and so on; all of that then has more targets to hit, and they are being hit.

Ian Townsend: When it comes to natural disasters in Australia, you'd think we'd be getting good at handling them by now. But things seem to be getting worse.

The 2009 Black Saturday bushfires were the country's deadliest fires. The recent Queensland floods are the country's most expensive floods. It's partly because there are more people and businesses in the firing line. And it might be partly due to climate change.

But one of the reasons we're getting more disasters, both natural and man-made, is because the world's becoming more complicated.

An American sociologist, Charles Perrow, has a theory he calls 'normal accidents.' The more complex things are, the greater the chance that something goes wrong, that systems become so complicated, accidents become 'normal'.

Charles Perrow: The world and all its aspects, economic, social so forth, is becoming far more complexly interactive and by that I mean that in a complex system there can be small failures which can interact in a way that nobody anticipated and defeat the safety systems that have been installed to prevent disasters.

Ian Townsend: The most dangerous systems are those which are both complex and what's called 'tightly coupled'. Everything's connected to everything else, usually through technology.

Global financial markets are enormously complex and tightly coupled, so the potential for disaster is huge, as the global financial crisis showed, when a type of mortgage in the US failed and economies around the world ground to a halt.

Even the way we manage disasters when they happen have become very complex and tightly coupled to the events they're supposed to stop.

For example, Australia's increasingly severe bushfires are linked to the way we try to manage fires.

An expert in fire risk and behaviour at Melbourne University, Kevin Tolhurst.

Kevin Tolhurst: There is an increase in severity and part of that, just taking the south-eastern Australia so the largely Victorian and New South Wales sort of perspective, we've sort of been through a phase I guess where we have become more effective at controlling fires. The use of aircraft and bulldozers and roads and fire-trucks and so on, we've been relatively effective at controlling close to 99% of fires. Part of the result of that is reducing the amount of fire in the landscape, so over a period of about 30 years we've had a build-up of greater and greater areas that haven't had fire in them, as a result of our more effective fire suppression.

Ian Townsend: And there's a debate at the moment about whether Wivenhoe dam, west of Brisbane, designed partly to stop floods, actually made the recent Brisbane floods worse.

At Stanford University in California, Charles Perrow.

Charles Perrow: We don't allow the floodplains to flood, we build on them, and then we build dykes and dams and so forth, to try to protect the people. But every time we build a dyke the water then can rise higher, so when the dyke collapses in an abnormal storm, the damage is ever greater. And with the climate change we're getting more and more focused on these perverse forms of adaptation: seawalls that will protect Chesapeake Bay in the US, or movable gates in Venice that will protect Venice from the water. That's a form of resilience which just increases the probability of more deaths.

Ian Townsend: But we've been overlooking something crucial. Decades of disaster inquiries and reports invariably recommend the same thing - that the best way to lessen the impact of future disasters is to better educate and train people who live in disaster zones, so they know the risks and aren't constantly surprised when another fire or flood comes along. Which seems to be what's happening.

Fire expert, Kevin Tolhurst has been an expert witness at many of the bushfire disaster inquiries in recent decades, and he says our culture has to change if we're going to stop the future unfolding as a series of disasters that keep getting worse.

Kevin Tolhurst: We're never going to defeat fire; we're never going to defeat flood; we're never going to defeat cyclones. We actually have to learn of ways to actually live with those elements within our environment, and with the predictions of climate change, what we're seeing in fact is a ramping up of those, so we need to learn those lessons very quickly.

Antony Funnell: Kevin Tolhurst. And that report from Background Briefing's Ian Townsend. And if you want to hear more on that subject, make sure you tune in to Background Briefing this coming Sunday after the 9 o'clock news, right here on ABC Radio National. And if you miss it for whatever reason, remember you can always get a podcast, either from the Background Briefing website or via iTunes.

And just before I go, next Tuesday on Australia Talks, the subject is one close to our hearts -- 'Urbanisation' -- how do we build green cities and overcome the barriers to sustainable urban design? That's Australia Talks next Tuesday the 1st March.

Well that's it from me. Thanks to Andrew Davies and Jim Ussher, the other members of the production team. I'm Antony Funnell -- 'bye for now.